CHLOE WISE – THANK YOU FOR THE NICE FIRE
2021-03-29In this series, Wise proposes scenarios of simulated familiarity, where smiles, hand gestures, and utterances are at odds with underlying realities, such as widespread uncertainty, willful ignorance, growing inequality, and aspirational notions of “unity” that reinforce a status quo. Underneath (or alongside) the comfort of platitudes resides the chaotic potential of the abject.
In Baudrillard’s experimental travelogue America (1986), he cross-examines the American smile in postwar America and its own travel within Reagan’s America:
“The smile of immunity, the smile of advertising: ‘This country is good. I am good. We are the best’. It is also Reagan’s smile – the culmination of the selfsatisfaction of the entire American nation […] Smile to show how transparent, how candid you are. Smile if you have nothing to say. Most of all, do not hide the fact that you have nothing to say nor your total indifference to others.”
Opposite – All that free speech is very expensive, 2021
Exhibition runs through to April 24th, 2021
Almine Rech
39 East 78th Street
NY 10075
New York
